Twelve Black Code Monkeys

So Blair, a friend of mine, asked a bunch of us if we wanted to go to Atlantic City a few weeks ago. I hedged because I knew I’d be going to a bachelor party the weekend before and to NYC to visit the fam for the 4th of July. But late last week I was relatively rested. The pace of unpacking has slowed and I just felt like I could use a break, or at least that’s how I rationalized it to myself. Really, I had been psyching myself up for the trip for a while. I spending a lot of time on blackjackinfo.com, studying basic strategy and playing their excellent flash game that includes a strategy coach. I even took their charts and prettied them up, printed them out, and did my poor-man’s amateur scotch-tape lamination. I was ready! Or almost, anyway. I was getting about 97% of my hands correctly played.

Although I grew up in New York, only two and a half hours from Atlantic City, I didn’t get there till college. My parents were just not the gambling type. My mom to this day still hasn’t been there or to any casino. The first few times I went, I just played the slots. This was during college so the amount of money that I could lose without going into debilitating debt was in the double digits. I don’t think I ever came away with more money than I left.

Then about four years ago, our friend Jim had his bachelor party in AC. It had been at least 10 years since the last time I had been there and I was a bit more financially stable. On the way there one of our friends schooled me a bit in black jack basic strategy. I had played blackjack from childhood, but never knew there was an actual strategy based on probability. I’m not even sure that when I had played in the past that it was against a dealer who had to hit until they got to 17. So I was familiar with the very basics, but not any of the intricacies. We played quite a bit over the two days we were there and somehow I walked away with over $300. I was astounded. This was not chump change. It did seem to accumulate fairly steadily playing $10 bets. If it were this easy, I thought, I could, nay, SHOULD, come to AC on a regular basis to supplement my income! Yeah, that’s the ticket.

A couple months later, I could no longer wait. I got my two roommates at the time, Barry and Rich, and headed for AC again. We played black jack the whole time again, but somehow things didn’t work out the way they had before. I was down immediately and kept trying to dig myself out of this hole. By the end of the weekend, we had all lost around $700 each! It was not fun. We chocked it up to not leaving a table that was just continually taking our money. The dealer we had for a long time had a name tag that read “Khan” and we just kept yelling the name in an angry-James T. Kirk impersonation from Stark Trek III as our money slipped away.

This experience, of course, sobered us up to the fact that you can’t COUNT on winning anything when you gamble. This should be obvious but of course psychology can get in the way of the obvious. I for one decided that this was enough money to lose for quite a while and so didn’t want to have anything to do with gambling for a while. A year or so ago, Rich had a bachelor party in Vegas and I really did want to go, not just for the gambling, of course, but because it was his bachelor party and because I’d never been to Vegas. Alas, I could afford to at the time. I did not start thinking of AC at that point and really had no big wish to go there until Blair suggested it a few weeks ago.

So I headed there with Rich and his wife Jen and met Blair and a few friends and Rich’s parents. We spent a good amount of time at Bally’s Wild West playing black jack. Unfortunately the minimum bet was $15, making it a bit more volatile, but fortunately I got on a winning streak immediately and the slightly higher betting amount made it easy for me to accumulate a good chunk of money. Next we headed up to Resorts Casino, but we were there for only an hour at the most before having to go, and luckily at that point I was up as well. We spent a little time on the boardwalk and then grabbed some dinner before heading home.

It was a very successful trip, and I’m sure why. First of all, I won significantly more than I lost. Of course a big part of this is luck and so something that you can’t actually make happen. But also I went with firm limits about how much I was willing to lose and how much I would walk away with. I never got to that upper limit because another “limit” got in the way – our time limit. When you only have a finite amount of time, one that is relatively short, plus you mix meals in and a walk, etc., you don’t end up having an opportunity to lose large sums of money if you play the minimum bets and you choose a game that gives close to 50/50 odds. Of course this isn’t a certainty, but it’s at least a lot more likely with those things taken into account. I also have a different feeling coming home this time. Instead of the previous thoughts of being able to rely on this luck over and over again in order to get extra money, I feel like I was lucky enough this time and should enjoy my winnings for a good while before I go back and risk losing that same money again!

I figure a trip to AC once or twice a year is plenty for me at this point, but now that I have signed up for some of their club cards, they will be sending me offers, some of which, I’m sure, will be pretty tempting. I think the fact my wife isn’t a gambler and doesn’t like the whole idea of it is going to keep me away as much as anything else. We will have to see how this works out, but at least I don’t have illusions of ever relying on gambling as a form of income any more!

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